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Posted on November 15, 2015

Watching Horror Films in a Time of Terror

Dawn Keetley

Last night, Paris was attacked: news organizations are reporting that French President François Hollande has identified the terroristic violence as an “act of war” perpetrated by ISIS.[i]

Like many, I was transfixed to the news last night, horrified by what was unfolding in France. I happened to be away from home, in upstate New York for the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival. And watching the news from Paris made me wonder why I was here. Why watch and write about films—especially horror films—when there’s so much horror happening in real life?

Posted on November 14, 2015

Men and Chicken (2015): Reviews from #IIFFF

Dawn Keetley

Men and Chicken is written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, who also wrote and directed Flickering Lights (2000) and Adam’s Apples (2005). While I liked both of his earlier films, Men and Chicken is vastly better, my favorite film at #IIFFF so far.

It’s hard to categorize this brilliant film: it’s a family drama and a black comedy, as well as a horror film. It’s about a mad scientist (aptly named Evilio Thanatos) and about creating monsters. Men and Chicken inevitably evokes Frankenstein (as all mad scientist films do), but, still more directly, it echoes H. G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and the film based on it, The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932). The Island of Lost Souls, and Wells’ novel, deal particularly with a scientist bent on creating human-animal hybrids—also the project of Thanatos. His name (the word Freud used to signal the death drive) says everything about the success (and the costs) of his experiments.

In the aftermath of their father’s death, two brothers, Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Madds Mikkelsen), discover that he was not in fact their biological father. They travel to the Island of Ork to find their real father, but Evilio Thanatos, it turns out, is dead—which Gabriel discovers in a moment evocative of Lila’s discovery of Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho, another film about the creation of monsters. The three other sons of Thanatos—Franz, Josef, and Gregor (names evocative of Franz Kafka, the protagonist of “The Metamorphosis,” and Josef Mengele)—are still alive, however, and so Gabriel and Elias decide to stay with what’s left of their family, in an abandoned asylum that is also home to chickens, pigs, goats, rabbits, and a massive bull named Isak.

Posted on November 13, 2015

Ruby (1977) Review: Camp Horror At Its Finest

Elizabeth Erwin

Here’s a secret. For as much as I enjoy pedigreed horror films dripping with social criticism, there is nothing quite like an old-school horror film brimming with schlock and fun. Once the domain of the Saturday afternoon movies, forgotten low budget horror films are finding a brand new audience thanks to bootleg YouTube videos and VOD. And so I thought it was time to revisit one of my very favorite horror films of questionable taste: Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977).

Coming on the heels of her explosive turn in Carrie, Piper Laurie is luminous as the titular character, a woman trapped by her murderous past. With a borderline camp aesthetic that works because of the character’s showgirl past, Laurie’s performance fuels the atmospheric tone of the film, which is evocative of drive-in horror.[i] By blending a bit of 1930s supernatural dread with a heaping helping of 1940s film noir, Ruby manages not to trap itself in the decade in which it was made. The end result is a film that feels dated but in the best possible way.

Posted on November 13, 2015

Sensoria (2015): Reviews from Ithaca Film Festival

Dawn Keetley

Synopsis: Sensoria follows a woman, Caroline Menard (Lanna Ohlsson), who moves into a bleak apartment, with some strange neighbors. It slowly becomes clear that she has suffered devastating losses—her husband left her, a child died (perhaps a miscarriage). She seems utterly alone with the exception of one friend, Emma (Alida Morberg), whose visit is crucially important to Caroline, although it’s clear that Caroline isn’t crucial to Emma, leaving her too early.

Sensoria is shot almost exclusively in Caroline’s ugly, sterile apartment building. The film builds suspense slowly, as Caroline walks in a slow, almost catatonic state through the routine of moving in, her senses and her affect clearly deadened. Strange things start happening—objects move on their own, act on their own; lights, electric toothbrushes, microwaves, turn on by themselves. Strange noises combine with the multitude of sounds of apartment living.

As the tension intensifies, however, its effect is undercut by the fact that we learn very early on that what haunts Caroline’s apartment is unequivocally supernatural. Given how damaged the Caroline is, the lack of ambiguity about what is happening to her seems like a missed opportunity.

Posted on November 11, 2015

The Tech-Savy Ghost in The Woman in Black 1 & 2

Guest Post

“It’s just an old place cut off from the world,” is what Sam Daily tells Arthur Kipps about Eel Marsh House, a conventional Victorian mansion abandoned and falling into decay after its mistress’s tragic loss of a son and her death. It is not an unfamiliar story, particularly for the horror enthusiast. In fact, when The Woman in Black was released, I recall the complete lack of hype surrounding it: a beautifully-shot but typical ghost story, not at all what you might expect from Hammer. I’ve asked myself what it is that I love about this film if it does nothing new or exciting for the ghost story genre, and I think the answer lies in the setting and location of Eel Marsh House itself and the reproduction of something central to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ghost story. Beyond the seemingly timeless obsession with mothers and children, this film is obsessed with something else: technology and communication. And the dead master both much better than do the living.

The plot subsists on a steady stream of deaths. Lawyer Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe), who has lost his wife in childbirth, must travel to Crythin Gifford to settle the estate of Alice Drablow and to recover her papers from Eel Marsh House. When he arrives, the inhabitants of the town do everything in their power to convince him to turn around and go home. Sam Daily, who befriends him on the train, informs him of the local superstitions concerning Eel Marsh house, but, in the end, he takes Arthur to Eel Marsh House and helps him to “settle” the estate in a quite different way than he planned. As it turns out, the house is haunted by the ghost of Jennet Humfrye, Alice’s sister. The film ends with these men following all the rules by which to put a disturbed spirit to rest, only to find that rest is not what she wants.